


Kanaya Maryam Goes to Paris

by Callmesalticidae, shadow_wasserson



Series: The Gods Have Horns [12]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, F/F, Godstuck, Unrequited Love, Writer's Block, for a certain value of "swimming", there is some swimming involved, they go to Paris, writerly depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-26
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-06 05:50:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4210392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Callmesalticidae/pseuds/Callmesalticidae, https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadow_wasserson/pseuds/shadow_wasserson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Ellen Bhagwat, bestselling author and friend of the Sylph of Space. Now, she is going to Paris, and taking you with her, and you don't think you'll ever blink the stars out of your eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pizza and a Movie

**Author's Note:**

> Halfway through this story we will be taking a brief intermission for the next Guide to the Zodiac entry.

Your name is Ellen Bhagwat, and you have been staring at this same godsforsaken piece of paper for five whole minutes. That may not seem like a very long period of time, but prior to this you had been staring at another piece of paper for four hours before you decided that its blankness was somehow offensive and you threw it in the dustbin. It has not been very long since then, but you are already getting the feeling that this piece of paper is going to suffer the same fate.

It is a little odd, but you have found that, as your writer’s block intensifies, you invariably transfer your hatred to the individual piece of paper that is in front of you. This is almost certainly unfair, but you haven’t been getting any complaints yet.

You don’t even notice when you get a visitor. Growing impatient, Kanaya tells you as much.

“You didn’t even say hello,” she says.

“Mm?” And then, because that is hardly a civilized or elegant response: “How long have you been standing there?”

“Ten minutes.”

Scratch that, you’ve been staring at this paper for maybe fifteen minutes then, plus however long a span of time it was before Kanaya arrived.

“This is pretty serious, isn’t it?”

You barely shrug before you crush the paper into a ball and flick it away. You turn away from your horrible desk to look at Kanaya. Most people don’t get house calls from a goddess, even if they’re artists. You should be grateful, and act more enthused than you are.

Most people don’t get to be friends with a goddess. You shouldn’t make her regret coming over.

“Sorry about that. I was a little… distracted.”

“Getting all ready for your next work, eh?”

You nod. “I’m making a lot of progress.”

“Really.” Her tone betrays how little she believes you as she looks at the blank papers taped on the walls and scattered on the floor. “Ellen, when’s the last time that you had anything to eat?”

You’re silent for a moment. “What time is it?”

“A quarter past five in the evening.”

“Three hours!” you say triumphantly.

“Right. And if I reminded you that neither coffee nor cigarettes can be _eaten_?”

Your silence goes on for longer this time. “W-What  _day_  is it?”

Kanaya sighs. “Why do you put yourself through this?”

“Because I want to make you proud.” The words come out before they have a chance to pass through your brain, and you immediately regret them. You see sadness flash across her face but it goes as quickly as it comes, and then she smiles again. “Let’s watch a movie, Ellen.”

She takes your hand and guides you out of the room and sets you on the couch. “Wait there,” she says, before she blinks out of existence, coming back with a calamari-and-sausage pizza. She sets it on the coffee table in front of you and puts on a John Carpenter film before she curls up next to you.

This is normal. This is exceedingly normal, and gods are  _strange_. There are no lines at all to read between. None. So don’t try to.

She falls asleep a few minutes before the ending credits. You decide not to wake her. Eventually, after some time, it’s Kanaya who wakes  _you_  up, accompanying it with a rebuke: you did not eat as much of the pizza as she wanted you to. You’re still too tired to make much of a protest, and fall asleep again after she leaves. When you wake up for the second time there are two bags of groceries on the couch, and the refrigerator is full.

You put the rest of it away, make sure to eat something that Kanaya would approve of as breakfast, and chase it down with cigarettes and a copious amount of coffee. You don’t see anyone at all for the whole day and, though you miss lunch, memories of Kanaya are enough to make sure that you at least have an apple for dinner.

You get company again the next day, however, when Kanaya pops into being next to your desk. “We’re going to  _Paris_ ,” she announces.

“When? Now?”

She nods.

“But it’s winter,” you protest. “It’s too cold. I’ll catch something,” you say, and it’s true enough, even if you really just want to avoid going anywhere or doing anything that isn’t staring at walls of paper, waiting for words and images that will never come.

“Not that Paris, dear. It’s a  _star_. The Paris Star System.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s a brown dwarf. Nothing special. But we’re going to swim in it. Come on.” 


	2. Swimming in Paris

Your name is Ellen Bhagwat, and you are being shanghaied on a vacation to outer space.

Your response to this news is immediate: “I need to  _breathe_.”

Kanaya snaps her fingers, all for effect, and a pair of red bubble-headed jumpsuits appear on the ground. “Of spyryjyon manufacture.”

“Of  _what_?” You can’t even pronounce the name, and she expects you to trust your life with it?

She supplies you with the name again, but you don’t fare any better this time either. Maybe if you had a second throat or something like that. “You’ll barely feel it on you. In fact, I could swap it with what you’re wearing right now and I’d bet you wouldn’t even notice.”

“P-Please don’t do that.”

Kanaya shrugs. “I haven’t dressed the slow way for a million years. Undressed, sure, but that is actually fun to do.” She snaps both of her fingers this time, and then props up the visor of the suit that appeared around her. You’re glad for the show, if only to get your mind off what she just said. “Are you sure that you don’t want to…?”

“No, no. I can manage.” You pick the suit off from the floor and head to the bathroom. Trying to figure it out is a Herculean task at first, and then you feel ridiculous for overlooking an obvious detail and accomplish your task without further trouble. After you seal it up a hiss is emitted in the area of your neck. What comes out are not horrible bitey snakes, however, but a set of straws. Sucking on one, you find that what comes out is… some kind of fruit juice, but not one that you can put a name to.

When you come out, visor up, you see Kanaya holding out a sandwich. “You’ll want to attach this to the side of your helmet,” she says.

“Pardon?”

“Do you see those clasps on the side of your helmet? That’s for attaching food so you can eat it when your helmet is up. Astronauts used to do it, back in the day. This is a very retro suit. Retro is good. Not that you should worry about bread crumblies, my dear. This bread will stay perfectly intact.”

She holds it up before you for military inspection, and you lean in to get a closer look. “I can’t eat that. I have a peanut allergy,” you say. It isn’t a lie, either, but you are still disappointed to find that she’s perfectly willing to make a swap. One smile and a blink of existence later, and she has chicken sandwiches instead.

“So, um…” You look at your hands. “A sun. We’re going to be swimming in a sun, you said? And… I’m not going to die. Because that is a thing that I think I have reason to be concerned about. You not so much, but I’m hardly divine.”

Kanaya laughs. Maybe you would compare it to the sound of a frog, but only if one allowed that frogs made music with their croaks. Then it ends, and her eyes are fixed on yours, deadly serious. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes, bu—”

The visor goes down and there are no more words. The world turns reddish-orange all around you, like you’ve been shrunk and thrown into a bowl of tomato soup. For the briefest moment you do not feel hot, but  _cold_ , and then it ends and you are normal again.

Except that you are not, you have simply stopped freezing. Because the world is still red and you are weightless and abandoned and Kanaya is—

“Guess where, Ellen!”

You let out a breath. You calm down. Maybe you can’t see her but she’s somewhere around here, close enough for a signal to reach the headset in your helmet. Not even the gods can speak faster-than-light.

“Where?”

“We’re in Paris!”

“B-But how? We’re in a sun, we should be…” Is it the suits? Is this why she didn’t pick human-made hardware?

You feel something hit your back. It is a light impact, but as you are sent coasting through endless redness you panic anyway, until the sensation spreads around your stomach like a pair of arms and you realize— most literally, Kanaya has your back.

“How?” you ask again?

You feel your course turn, and realize that Kanaya must be  _flying_  now. Flying through a star. You can’t see it, and you can hardly believe it, but it’s  _happening_.

“Some scientists call brown dwarfs ‘failed stars’ too. Some of them can be very hot, objectively. They would roast you, but even on Earth the technology is highly-developed enough to protect you. Not from the crushing gravity, like these do, but the temperature.” So it  _is_  the suits, you decide, but she continues on and shatters that idea. “That is at the high end, however.”

She pauses as the two of you do a loop-de-loop. Or, rather, as she does one, and pulls you along for the ride.

“Paris is two-hundred-and-seventy degrees Kelvin. That’s about twenty-six degrees Fahrenheit.”  _Our Lord of Detroit_ , if the suit needed a moment to adjust then no wonder you were cold at first. “And there are brown dwarfs that are colder than that.”

You close your eyes. The visor seems to understand your intention and becomes opaque so that you go immediately from red to black. You wonder how much it had been filtering the star’s light before this, and how far it could go.

But for now you hang in the black. Weightless and suspended from nothing, but not alone. 


	3. Full of Stars

You alternate between monochrome frames, red and black, black and red, as you close and open your eyes. There is nothing to see. All there is to hear, moreover, is the beating of your heart as it pounds and echoes in your skin and the space of your suit.

All there is to feel, is the same, and Kanaya’s arms around you as she pulls you this way, then that, through the heart of a glorious, yet failed, star. You are forced to conclude that it has only failed nominally, and that it is majestic in its own right. Had it been able to reach the glory of its fellows, then you never would have had this opportunity. For the sake of its flaws, you are able to know it more intimately than you could know those stars which some would call its betters.

If stars could dream, you would hope that this was consolation enough.

“Do you trust me?” Kanaya asks you. Her voice crackles as it comes in over the headset. Even human technology is better than that, so no doubt it is intentional, another attempt at being “retro.”

You close your eyes and the world turns from red to black again. “Forever.”

“Then trust me.”

You scarcely have time enough to register the words before there is a push against your back and you feel Kanaya leave you. Or you leave her, falling through the endless red.

You don’t scream. You want to, but you told Kanaya that you trusted her. So you close your eyes, and open them, going back and forth between monochrome sheets, and—

Perhaps it is cliché, but gods of gods, it is  _full of stars_. You have erupted from Paris like a tiny human solar flare and now, as the brown dwarf recedes behind you ever so slowly, all that meets your vision is an endless field of stars.

“They’re galaxies, Ellen. Every last one of them,” Kanaya says, before she appears in your vision like a magnificent comet, with gossamer jade wings unfurled and beating. Against what, you have no idea, but they move anyway. The suit must have been custom-made in order to accommodate her wings, or else its makers had wings of their own, and there was some additional section of the suit which she had neglected to wear, which would have covered them.

She is like a pillar of light. In her wake she leaves a trail of stars behind her, like a Milky Way band all her own. You have seen the majesty of a star, but it is outshone by this.

You wonder if Tracy Smith, the poet, had ever seen such a sight. “Buoyant, bizarrely benign. Relics of an outmoded design. Some like to imagine a cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars.”

“What’s that?” Kanaya asks, and you realize that you had spoken the words aloud.

“N-Nothing.”

Almost too far away for you to make her out, Kanaya turns around with a few beats of her wings. Faster than you can speak, she returns and softly collides into you. The two of you spin and soar while she does nothing to correct your course or stop your whirling. Weightless as you are, it is easy to tell yourself that it is not the two of you who are turning but the stars— the galaxies— around you, as you are in the midst of them.

It is easy to tell yourself, and almost as easy to believe, that you are the center of the universe here. But you are with Kanaya, and that is the far better portion.

“So. Every one of those is a galaxy,” you repeat.

“Every one. And each of them is inhabited. There are worlds and kingdoms almost without end, Ellen. Everywhere that we have gone, we have found life somewhere there. I have seen billions of years pass by, and in all my journeying I have not exhausted all that the universe offers. So much of it has never known the gods, but these?” Kanaya looks away from you, to them. “All these galaxies that you see, so many and so far away that they look like stars—  _they_  know us.”

Alone as you are, it feels as if you are the last two people in the universe. But you aren’t. You can see that for yourself, even. All of those galaxies, a universe of inhabited worlds that must be more numerous than all the sands of the Earth. You are not the last. You are not alone. 

“I want you to go to the stars, Ellen. I can make paths for you to follow, but someday you will have engines of your own. When you do, you will go to the stars, as your cousins have done before you.”

To hear Kanaya tell it, perhaps there is no such thing at all as being alone. Perhaps there is only the company that you can see, and the company which you don’t yet know how to see. The friends you have, and the friends that you have yet to meet. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Upon further research, a few of the details of the last chapter have been changed to reflect a better scientific understanding of brown dwarf stars. Nothing major, but the color of the star has been changed and the gravity has been addressed.


	4. Space Between Worlds

For at least an hour you do nothing but drift together, side by side, and watch as tiny, distant galaxies turn around you like stars. You find out that the unidentifiable fruit juice is called jabuticaba. It is not, contrary to your first guess, an alien thing, but actually originates from southeastern Brazil. The fruit is so fragile and so quick to ferment, however, that only the Sylph of Space can transport it any large distance.

The other two straws, you have discovered, lead to reservoirs of chocolate milk and unflavored soda water. You are not entirely certain how any of this actually fits in your suit. Something about “hypercompression bluh bluh” and sometimes you think that Kanaya gives you made-up answers because the facts are just a thousand years ahead of Earth’s most cutting-edge science.

Without warning, Kanaya grabs the front of your suit and brings you together. She’s almost laying on top of you now, or standing in front of you and pulling you close. Without orientation, without a  _down_ , it’s hard to tell. But there is a gleam in her eyes, amid her shining face, that makes you not care about the technicalities. At such close range, your helmets touching, it’s almost like looking into the sun, but you don’t want to turn away.

“I’m so old,” Kanaya whispers later. You can barely hear it coming in over the headset, scarcely distinguish it from the “retro” static in the background. She places a hand over your visor, where your cheek would be. “I spent thousands of years of years in death. I couldn’t even scream. There wasn’t any air to carry the sound. All we had was each other, while we waited for the universe to cool down. It’s all a haze now. But I was dying for longer than your species has existed. Ellen, I’m so old. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

You nod.

“But I still can’t get enough of this place. Of the space between worlds. There is a part of me that can only remember the millennia that we burned and suffocated, dying and returning to life just to die all over again, wondering if we had done something wrong, if  _I_  had done something wrong, and we had failed, and made a flawed universe. And yet there is another part, which is much bigger, which can only think about how beautiful those galaxies are.”

She smiles. You follow suit. She turns away.

“What are your dreams like, Ellen?”

“Like replays of past days,” you tell her. “It’s like there’s a movie recorder in my head, running all the time, and then at night the little people there pop out old tapes and run them over. Sometimes they get out the editing software and splice things together. Sometimes I don’t remember how things really went, after I’ve dreamt about it often enough.”

“Sollux tells me that I still dream. He hooked me up and monitored me for a month one time, a thousand years ago or more. But I don’t remember them. Every time I fall asleep it feels like dying.” She chuckles softly. “I am not just being figurative. I’ve died more times than I can count. The break in consciousness is exactly the same.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Sometimes I look back on those years and I think, maybe there was a purpose to it all. To part of me, every second could be felt. And to another, I passed through it all in the span of an eye blink. Here I was, ready to pass through the door, and then— there  _she_ was, Aradia, putting her arms around me and pulling me far into the future, rescuing me into a time where there was an atmosphere to breathe. In between there was agony, but it was a kind of timeless agony that came and went before I recognized it. But the important thing is that I was no longer afraid.”

“What do you mean?”

“Death. I do not welcome it. I do not despair of living. But for a god there is no end in death, only pain. I have experienced such great pain, for so long, and none of it can hold any power over me. I think that’s why we had to go through that.”

“Thank you. For suffering that, for us.”

“You are welcome, Ellen. I have been more than repaid.” 


	5. City of Lights

You float amid the stars for forever and a day. Or halfway into the evening. One of those is more accurate. One of those is more poetic. You’d like to think you know which is better, under those constraints.

But it seems that even forevers must come to an end at some point. In a moment you have all the splendor of the galaxies around you, and the brown dwarf called Paris, and the pseudo-planets that orbit around it. In the next you are back at your apartment. Your suit has been replaced with a hoodie and an old pair of red sweatpants. Kanaya’s suit is gone as well, replaced by handsome formal wear. Completing the outfit are equally-handsome jade gloves, and a tie of the same color.  

You don’t think about it, you just, you just  _move_. The collar of her shirt is in your hands, along with a bit of her tie. You’ve pulled her close, as close as you were when the two of you were orbiting Paris, but the difference is this:  _you don’t have helmets this time_.

You could kiss her. It’s only been a couple of heartbeats since you pulled her in and she isn’t reacting and you could just… kiss her. Right now. Now or never. You can’t hold her there all day long.

It feels as if it were happening to someone else. Like you’re just some observer. You can hardly believe that you’re standing right here, with her, and— it doesn’t matter. None of it does.

You pull her in all the way, but you put your head on her shoulder and wrap your arms around her. You don’t kiss her. You thank her, and when she asks if you are feeling okay you tell her that you’re fine, and she can go now, but don’t forget to visit soon.

Maybe she smiles. You don’t know. You can’t look at her. Then she vanishes. You do not fall to your knees. You do start to cry, but you do it standing up.

She doesn’t love you. She doesn’t love you and she probably can’t love you, and that’s okay.

Gods have dallied with mortals before. There are stories and legends, and though you aren’t so brash as to ask Kanaya for gossip about the rest of the pantheon, you hear things anyway. So you know that every god, from Aries to Pisces, has had a human partner at some point. And it sometimes works out, at least for a little while. Every god but the Sylph of Space.

There are no credible stories of the Sylph ever taking mortals as any kind of lover, not in any of the ways that gods do. No one knows quite why. But there is no reason you can think of why she would change that pattern for you.

You manage to push yourself over to the desk. After you sit down it’s all that you can do for a minute to keep from falling off. You take the pen in your hand. And you force yourself to write.

In sacred texts, ‘love’ is called ‘pity.’ The most holy kind of love is caring for someone, despite or even because of their flaws. But you remember what she said to you, and how she talked about the future of your species. It isn’t that she doesn’t pity you. It’s that she doesn’t pity  _any_  of you. All that you can see in yourself is the gangrenous flaws and foibles that run up and down your history but she doesn’t care about that at all. That isn’t a thing, so far as she’s concerned.

You don’t know what the world looks like to Kanaya. Maybe she has just as many cones in her eyes as humans do. Maybe she doesn’t. But you know that when she looks at you, she doesn’t see weakness. She doesn’t see something that she  _can_  pity. Nothing she can love. Not with you, not with anyone.

And if that’s the case… Then you can live with this. She doesn’t love you, she can’t even pity you, and that’s okay. When Kanaya looks at you the only thing that she sees is strength. And she sees that in everybody.

So you write. You write of green-backed fish swimming in a sea of light. You write of a lost meteor, looking for home, crashing to the earth after mistaking city lights for distant nebulae. You write of galaxies dancing, of one little galaxy that asks the big one to dance, and they dance until they collide and fling new stars across the cosmos. You write of love songs echoing from star to star, across the universe and back, becoming garbled with each repeition, like white noise, like static, like spring peepers in the woods. You write of a romance between a sun and its orbiting planet, the tiny rock yearning to be incinerated in the star’s bright nuclear heart. You think you might write until your hands are too weak to hold a pen and your heart gives out.

You call the work  _City of Lights_ , and when you give a copy to Kanaya, your goddess, your friend, she puts a hand on your shoulder, and says “I will keep this forever.”

And it doesn’t matter how many times she’s said that before, or how many gifts she’s received from the devoted. Because that book is your heart, and when she turns its pages it is your pages she’s turning, and when she looks at your words it’s your soul she’s reading.

You’ll always carry the light of Paris with you, to the end of your days, and the Sylph of Space will carry a part of you, to the end of all days. And for you, that will be enough.


End file.
